Welcome. My name is Gene Haycraft, I carried the mail in Terre Haute for thirty-one years, and I have been rolling Strat-O-Matic dice since the spring of 1965. I am the commissioner of this league, which is a fancy word for the fellow who keeps the scoresheets in a filing cabinet in his basement and gets the phone calls when somebody disputes a ruling.

There are eight of us. We are old. We draft from the new cards every spring, we play our games around a card table or through the U.S. Mail, and we have been doing it, in one form or another, for twenty-one years. This page is for us, and for anybody else out there who still believes the best baseball game ever made comes in a box.

Strat-O-Matic is a baseball game played with cards and dice. Hal Richman invented it as a young man and has been selling it out of Long Island since 1961. Every year, after the season, the company puts out a new set of cards, one for every player who played a meaningful amount, and the cards are worked out from what that player really did. If a man hit 70 home runs, his card hits a lot of home runs. If a man couldn't hit his weight, his card can't either.

How it works, in a paragraph. You roll three six-sided dice: one white and two red. The white die tells you whose card to read. A 1, 2 or 3 sends you to the batter's card, and a 4, 5 or 6 to the pitcher's. The two red dice, added together, give you a number from 2 to 12, and that number picks a line on the card: single, strikeout, fly ball to center, home run. Some lines are split, and for those you roll a twenty-sided die to settle it. Some lines send you to the fielding chart, where your shortstop's range and his error rating decide whether that grounder is an out or a disaster. That's the heart of it. On top of that there are ratings for running, stealing, a pitcher's endurance, the ballpark, and more, and a good manager learns to use all of it.

Why do grown men still play this when there are computer games? Because the cards are right. Because you can feel the numbers. Because you can sit across a card table from your friend of forty years and argue about whether to bring in the left-hander, and because when McGwire steps in and the white die comes up a 1, everybody at the table stops talking. They make a computer version now. We don't use it.

I found Strat-O-Matic through an ad in the back of a baseball magazine in 1965 and played it alone for years, replaying whole seasons at the kitchen table. My wife Jeanne says she married a man and got a man plus a shoebox full of dice. In the winter of 1978, at the post office, I found out that John and Curtis on the next routes over had the same habit. Bob and Ted came from the Moose Lodge, and George from church, Ken from the bowling alley, and Steve was Curtis's brother-in-law. We held our first draft in my basement in March of 1979, with the 1978 cards, and we have held one every spring since.

Steve moved to Ohio in 1988 and Miles took his place. We lost Ken in 1994, a heart attack at sixty-one, and Don came in the next spring. Ken won our very first championship, and we still call the trophy the Ken Cup, which is a bowling trophy with a baseball glued on top, which Ken would have found very funny.

Ted retired to Florida in 1996 and Miles moved to Evansville to be near his daughter, so they play by mail now. The other six of us still meet the first Saturday of every month in my basement, and anybody who misses has to bring the donuts the next time.

John has four, which he mentions. Curtis has three. Gene, Bob, George, Ted and Ken have two apiece, and Steve, Miles and Don one each.

A note on the 1995 season: the 1994 cards came from a season that stopped in August for the strike, so every man on them had played a little over two-thirds of a year. We played a short schedule that spring to match, and Ted won it, and some people (Curtis) still put an asterisk next to it.

1. The draft. Every spring, after the new cards come, we start over. Nobody keeps anybody. We draft 25 rounds, snake order, worst finish from the year before picks first in round one, and the order flips each round. The draft is held face to face on a Saturday in March, and the mail owners send me a list ahead of time, in order of preference, and I pick for them off it. See this year's draft.

2. Rosters. Twenty-five men, no more. At least ten pitchers and at least two catchers. You may play a man at any position his card rates him at, and nowhere else. The commissioner will not be talked into letting your center fielder play shortstop "just this once."

3. The schedule. 112 games: sixteen against each of the other seven clubs, in four-game series. Two divisions of four. The two division winners meet in a best-of-seven in December for the Ken Cup.

4. Usage. Nobody bats more than his real at-bats, plus ten percent, prorated to our schedule. Pitchers the same with innings. I keep the count. If you go over, the extra games are forfeits. This rule exists because of one season in the 1980s that John would rather I didn't describe.

5. Trades. Anything for anything, between any two owners, until the trade deadline, which is the last day of July. Both owners call or write the commissioner. No trades after the deadline. No trades of a man to one owner and back again the same season.

6. Face-to-face games. First Saturday of each month, my basement, 9 a.m. until we're done or until Jeanne says we're done. The home team rolls. Every game is kept on a scoresheet, in pencil, and turned in to me before you leave.

7. Games by mail. When you play a mail owner, he sends you his lineups and a manager's sheet: his batting orders against right- and left-handers, his rotation, his bullpen order, who to pinch-hit for whom and when to pull a tired starter. You play the series honestly by his sheet, at your own table, and mail the scoresheets back to him and a copy to me within two weeks. If his sheet doesn't cover a situation, you do what a sensible manager would do, and you write down what you did. We have played this way for years and there has never once been a cheating complaint. There have been many complaints about handwriting.

8. Postage. Is on you. It went up to 33 cents in January. I carried the mail for thirty-one years and I am not going to hear anybody complain about postage.

9. Disputes. Go to the commissioner. If the dispute involves the commissioner's own team, it goes to Bob, who has been fair about it every time, even when it cost him.